More Contest Rules plus Responses

The official rules of the contest are slowly emerging with the help of a few incisive questions, like the one about a possible 49ers first-day trade limiting their choices to just one pick. New rule: The contest is for the first three picks, wherever they might fall.

The contest is to accurately guess the team’s first two picks and the third pick is a tie-breaker. Remember e-mail your picks to ninerinsider.com and include your blog name. And again, good luck. Official rules.

THE 49ERS IN LA?: The NFL always seems to be shifting on it’s quest to place a team in Los Angeles, but as of a few years ago here was the thinking.

The league wanted neither the 49ers nor the Raiders to relocate to L.A. As we all know, L.A. fans are fickle and they won’t support a mediocre team. The NFL would consider an expansion team in Los Angeles because of the huge payment the ownership would have to pay to the league to become part of the NFL.

The NFL would like to pick the new tenant in Los Angeles carefully, because if the league does expand, that means that owners would split revenues 33 ways instead of 32. So the money a L.A. team generates would have to be somewhat substantial to make up for the new split. Former commissioner Paul Tagliabue felt the large L.A. market would more than make up for the split.

The league would have no qualms with an unbalanced schedule if it meant more money. Every team has a bye anyway.

However, the NFL might not be able to stop a team from moving there. A precedent was set when the league tried to sue the Raiders for moving to Los Angeles.

Say what you will about the Yorks, they seemed determined to keep the team in the Bay Area. However, the Yorks have also proven to be very unpredictable.

IS SEIFERT OR WALSH THE DEFENSIVE GENIUS?: George Seifert doesn’t get anywhere close to the credit he deserves for what he did with the 49ers. Former linebacker Keena Turner once said that Seifert was just as innovative on defense as Walsh was on offense. Seifert, for example, helped usher in the age of situation substitution.

Walsh believed you could fool ’em on offense, but on defense, you had to be talented, so he was probably a strong advocate of drafting defensive linemen, but no one wanted to draft D-linemen more than Seifert. When he was the head coach, Seifert once joked that the rest of his staff would tackle him before he got to the draft board to prevent him from taking another defensive lineman.

From 1989 to 1997 (the Seifert years) the 49ers took 17 defensive linemen and seven offensive linemen. Defensive linemen generally have shorter careers than their offensive counterparts. Also, the offensive line coach back then was the late Bobb McKittrick, who ran a fairly unique style of running game that called for relatively light, agile and smart linemen. The rest of the league wanted to get big plodders. So McKittrick was able to find players in the late rounds (Jesse Sapolu, Chris Dalman) and even went with free agents (Derrick Deese).

KauaiRobert asked about protection of practice squad players. There aren’t any. A team can pilfer another team’s practice squad players at will, the only stipulation being that the practice-squad player must be placed on the new team’s active roster.

The NFL needs to change that ruled regarding quarterbacks. A team should be allowed to protect a quarterback for the purposes of development. The league is always looking for offense and allowing teams to groom quarterbacks would lead to more scoring.

Reno, so sorry to hear about your dog. How is it that those furry beasts crawl so easily into our hearts?